These developers want to stop using, and paying for, GitHub to protest the treatment of Julie Ann Horvath. But they consider it essential for their work, and don’t see a better substitute.

Enter Coraline Ehmke and Betsy Haibel. The two Ruby on Rails developers, who met at a retreat last year, launched a service they dubbed Culture Offset, which funnels donations from GitHub users to projects that support women and minorities in technology.

The idea is similar to “carbon offsets” through which people make donations toward planting trees or other measures to reduce carbon emissions, intended to offset their share of pollution tied to climate change.

Ehmke, a Web developer in Chicago, said the women wanted to give GitHub users a productive outlet for their frustration. “My thought was, what if they gave some money to people who are trying to fix these problems in the broader community?” she says.

GitHub is a code-management system that allows groups of people to contribute to the same project without stepping on each others’ toes. The networked nature of the service makes it hard for users to replicate GitHub if their peers don’t agree to switch. And even if individuals and organizations were willing to try a competing service, such as Bitbucket, it’s hard for them to evaluate the culture of the competitor.

“As a rule I avoid doing business with companies that don’t treat their employees with respect,” said Chicago software engineer Max Stahl. He says GitHub “doesn’t right now live up to that standard,” but adds, “I am absolutely dependent on them and would not be able to switch to a different host any time soon.”

There’s an irony involved: Culture Offset itself is built on GitHub. To help move money from users to their preferred organizations, the project uses Gittip, a way for GitHub users to give small weekly cash gifts to others.

“We’re using the tools that people are famliar with,” Haibel said. “It was an easy way to get a page up quickly, and we’re targeting people who had to stay on GitHub.”

GitHub did not respond to request for comment.

Adam Sontag, a New York developer, first noticed Culture Offset on Twitter. He said the project’s mission resonated with him because he has been concerned about the lack of equity and diversity in tech for several years. But as a developer he relies on GitHub and leaving the hosting service wasn’t practical.

He is now one of the 15 people who has signed Culture Offset’s pledge. He has started matching the $7 a month payments he makes to GitHub with a donation to CallbackWomen, an organization dedicated to helping foster gender diversity in speaker lineups at tech conferences.

“I felt like taking some concrete action to at least move the needle,” he says.